</a>Implications for e-democracy and crowdsourcing

Considering All the Strategic Options (Part #7)

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Since EU elections by direct universal suffrage began 30 years ago, turnout has dwindled progessively. On the last occasion the average turnout was less than 46 percent. To raise public awareness and encourage voter engagement in anticipation of the European elections of June 2009, Europe's voters are being invited by the European Parliament to step into room-sized, interactive multimedia cubes in prominent public places, such as city centre squares. Within such a "Choice Box", the intention is to prompt people to record a video message, giving their views and opinions on what the European Parliament should do. Is the Choice Box an unforeseen metaphor of the in-the-box thinking by which choice is enabled by authorities for their consideration?

Might this offer an avenue for Tony Blair to accelerate his ongoing campaign to be President of the EU (Blair speech sparks EU presidency speculation, Euractiv, 14 January 2008; Tony Blair for president of Europe? The Guardian, 9 January 2009)? Perhaps by encouraging his supporters to express this "choice" in multiple video recordings? How will these then be processed and used?

Some video recordings will be screened daily outside but it is quite unclear how the views so expressed in (hundreds of) thousands of video recordings are then to be processed for the Parliament. Presumably a small selection will be made -- purely as an exericse in public relations -- some to be shown in the hemicycle above? Will they be uploaded to YouTube and tagged by enthusiasts -- as a means of communicating effectively with Members of Parliament? Or perhaps rendered succinctly into text messages for them via Twitter?

Would such representatives be satisfied by presenting their own views for their peers in the hemicycle by a similar process? Would that assist in the consideration and selection of strategic options -- especially if representatives in the hemicycle were to Twitter?

How effectively can the views of millions of people be "represented" through such mechanisms -- or through "voting" -- with so many poorly explored constraints on meaningful comunication? Or is the undeclared purpose merely tokenism and pretence? At what cost?

Technically there is considerable potential for widespread electronic consultation, leading to enthusiastic proposals for e-democracy, participatory democracy and crowdsourcing. The basic challenge involves use of the scarcest resource -- the "attention time" of those charged with processing large quantities of input, notably elected representatives -- as discussed elsewhere (Practicalities of Participatory Democracy with International Institutions: Attitudinal, Quantitative and Qualitative Challenges, 2003; Possibilities for Massive Participative Interaction: including voting, questions, metaphors, images, constructs, melodies, issues, symbols, 2007)..

As Head of the Unit for e-Government of DG Information Society, Paul Timmers (Coherent Agenda for e-Democracy: an EU perspective, 2005) outlines the initial efforts at Interactive Policy Making for input to policy-making through spontaneous feedback and online consultation. As an example, an internet-enabled consultation resulted in the collection of 6,500 contributions published on a Commission website for full transparency to show which organization, company or individual had advocated which amendments. This does not clarify how final decisions were made in the light of this consultation. Furthermore it is not clear how the evolution of such a possibility (in 2005) is related to current decision-making with the benefit of Choice Box input as a means of popular consultation (in 2009).

It is intriguing that the hemicycle is an architectural configuration dating from the construction of arenas in classical Greece and Rome. Whilst these were admired for their acoustics, the acoustics of the European Parliament are deplored. Is this too a metaphor of the unexplored challenges of communication -- even amongst those charged with considering strategic options and selecting amongst them? Curiously electronic communication equipment was only permitted in the French model of that hemicycle, in the Palais Bourbon, in 2008 (Les ordinateurs débarquent dans l'Hémicycle, avril 2008). Whilst a major proportion of the EU administrative budget is devoted to interpretation and translation -- perhaps to be augmented for Choice Box feedback -- it would appear that no significant funding is devoted to other challenges of the communication process, if they are recognized.

The technical possibilities have been widely, enthusiastically and insightfully debated (Frank Bannister, e-Democracy:*an information systems perspective; Steven L. Clift, Government and Democracy: representation and citizen engagement in the information age, 2004). But beyond the unquestionable technical feasibility, where are the above issues given due consideration through meaningful simulations? At the World e-Democracy Forum? Where is the feasibility of simulating the democratic challenge considered -- despite recognitiom of the democratic deficit and voter apathy? Curiously the point has been ironically made that (as a sham) many processes of democracy are already, as they stand, "simulations" of what they might become (Dmitriy Yefimovich Furman, Simulation of Democracy Seen as Possibly Developing Into Real Thing, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 11 April 2007).

At the same time, it is clear that aspects of the process can give rise to satisfactory outcomes in some cases -- in the form of open source projects, including the development of software, hardware and databases, otherwise known as community-based design or distributed participatory design. An unusual example is the (playful) collective design of dynamic mechanisms by the Soda Constructor community -- suggesting organizational and strategic analogues (Animating the Representation of Europe: visualizing the coherence of international institutions using dynamic animal-like structures, 2004). The successful extension of such paradigms to community democracy has yet to be demonstrated -- if only as a test of assumptions about alternative social forms. The operation of virtual or cyberparliaments remains to be effectively explored by simulation (The Challenge of Cyber-Parliaments and Statutory Virtual Assemblies, 1998; Using Research in the Participative Orchestration of Europe, 2004).

In terms of the challenge for representatives of managing information overload, there is a vital need to simulate how this is handled, especially when some vital information is excluded from consideration by that process. It is indicative that one of the processes typical of MBA educational programmes is to give students far more information than they can possibly process (each evening) in the expectation that they will develop techniques of selectivity that do not select out vital anomalies (when tested on the following day). The challenge also lends itself to analysis in terms of techniques of information clustering and the attention span with respect to clusters exceeding a certain size or requiring "drill down" beyond a certain level. These issues are discussed in Representation, Comprehension and Communication of Sets: the Role of Number (1978). The challenge calls for innovative use of mnemotechnics (In Quest of Mnemonic Catalysts -- for comprehension of complex psychosocial dynamics, 2007).

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